Product description

Madresfield Court is an arrestingly romantic stately home in the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. It has been continuously owned and lived in by the same family, the Lygons, back to the time of the Domesday Book, and, unusually, remains in the family's hands to this day. Inside, it is a very private, unmistakably English, manor house; a lived-in family home where the bejewelled sits next to the threadbare. The house and the family were the real inspiration for "Brideshead Revisited": Evelyn Waugh was a regular visitor, and based his story of the doomed Marchmain family on the Lygons.Never before open to the public, the doors of Madresfield have now swung open to allow Jane Mulvagh to explore its treasures and secrets. And so the rich, dramatic history of one landed family unfolds in parallel with the history of England itself over a millennium, from the Lygon who conspired to overthrow Queen Mary in the Dudley plot; through the tale of the disputed legacy that inspired Dickens' "Bleak House"; to the secret love behind Elgar's "Enigma Variations"; and the story of the scandal of Lord Beauchamp, the disgraced 7th Earl.

Author information

Jane Mulvagh read history at Cambridge and is the author of a biography of Vivienne Westwood. She lives in Yorkshire and London, and has been researching Madresfield for the last three years.

Review quote

"Madresfield is a scholarly, evocative and beautifully written study, in which Jane Mulvagh builds up a thrillingly vivid historical portrait ... Madresfield is a little masterpiece, as rich and rare as the house itself and all its fabulous store of treasures." -- Selina Hastings Daily Mail "Fascinating history of this very private house ... Mulvagh is a tactful tour-guide with a convincing appreciation of the periods and materials that have enriched the place ... she sets the reader at ease, and generally knows how to prick our interest ... lays out for the first time the full heartbreaking background." -- Nicholas Shakespeare Telegraph "Covers 1,000 years or so of country house history, and comes crammed with eccentric earls and fanatic law-suits ... the seductions of the house itself: its lavishly ornamented chapel, its antique Book of Hours, its relics from the heady days of the Oxford Movement ... burned in Waugh's imagination for over a decade, eventually emerging to give Brideshead Revisited its setting and a fair amount of its cast and paraphernalia ... a high-class guidebook in which the human exhibits can be quite as exotic as the objets d'art." -- D J Taylor Independent on Sunday "A delightful work of social history, beautifully written." Daily Express "The house has its own tantalising tales to tell...Mulvagh vivdly brings to life the dramatic history of one of Britain's oldest landed families." Tatler